EVE New Citizens Q&A

No, neither the beacon nor acceleration gate should be shot. Don't know if they'll get you concorded, but they're like the beacon and gate for missions, there so that ships (capsuleer ships) can enter the site and fight Sansha. You no more want to shoot them than you'd want to shoot the acceleration gate leading to a mission that you've been given.

There aren't Sansha ships at the beacon so that casual visitors (like you) don't get blown up in second.

Incursions are group PvE. Battleships usually, battlecruisers can do the smaller sites if well fit, but most of the incursion community want pilots flying battleships.

Nation Commander is, I think , a headquarters site, so typical fleet would be ~ 35 battleships and 5 logistics ships (remote repair ships) to finish the site

OK. That makes sense. Thanks!

Fighting incursions looks like fun. Maybe in a month or two I'll be up to cruisers and can join in.

A previous corp took a bunch of people out to an incursion to teach them (what it is, how you run it, etc). Biggest ship I had at the time was a cruiser, so I (with the FC's permission) took the little Thorax up, dual 1600 plates and most of the lows fitted with resists. DPS was terrible, but we were there to learn, not max ISK/hr.

Got primaried by Sansha and watched my entire armour bar vanish in a single volley, completely repaired by the logi, then volleyed through a second time and third before the Sansha fleet got to a managable size. Ship survived, barely.

Make that a month or 6....

YOu will need VERY good core skills and very good ship skills to get into the good fleets.

As said, they are looking mainly at Battleships / T2 cruiser (Ewar and Logi) / T3 (Ewar and boost) ships which are quite skill intensive.

Thanks for the advice, everyone!

J'Poll: First off, I've learned a lot from your posts on other threads, and I really appreciate all your comments and advice in the newbies forum. That said, I'm only one month in, and I'm an old wargamer. Incursion to me (before this thread) meant I'm playing defense; the enemy is invading our territory and we need to go stop them.

Now, I ran all the training missions, and on a mission I figured out (it was hardly intuitive) to take the acceleration gates. But if I can take them, why can't pirates? As a matter of fact, in RL, that's exactly how an airborne incursion / invasion works: First you send out pathfinders to mark landing zones and place beacons, then you send aircraft to drop men & material. The beacon and acceleration gate, coming from my background, look like exactly what the first stage of an enemy invasion should look like, and it would be quite natural to destroy the beacon and gate to prevent the enemy from using them.

So now, through the generosity of the commenters here, I know better. But I know because you told me, not because it's obvious.

Elena, J'Poll, & Cassie: Thanks for the advice on what to train for & expect. I think I'll start training toward logi cruisers just to get in on the action. I don't mind being support for a while. Watching how experienced operators work can be quite an education in itself.

I was responding to your comment and explaining why I misunderstood how incursions worked. That's all.

Anyway, thanks.

Short and sweet here we go Acceleration gates over all is a method to have you enter a (dungeon) as you would in other games, as for incursions they are invasions by Sansha into space not controlled by them. Each site is its own variation but in general a staging location. Overall you are playing defense and destroying the mothership causes the Sansha to retreat. Please see the Lore if you have more questions on background.

Thanks, Forest.

James: That's very useful advice. I appreciate it.

I've gotten players into properly built out t1 battleships that made minimum standards for VGs within 40 days of them subbing their account. It takes crash training hard, but it can be done, and they rapidly improve as they then begin to "pick the low hanging fruit" by grabbing all of the support skills they glossed over to get the 4-5 t2 module they need, the ability to sit in a battleship and use meta 4 guns appropriate to the hull.

Now, getting into a logistics ship is a much different story.